Archbishop Comensoli to help draft final Synod document

Published: 11 October 2018

Melbourne Archbishop Peter A. Comensoli has been appointed to the commission responsible for drafting the final document of the Synod of Bishops on Young People, the Faith and Vocational Discernment. Source: Vatican News.

Archbishop Comensoli was among the five prelates elected by region and chosen by a vote within the synod hall to draft the final document. He joins Cardinal Carlos Aguiar Retes, Archbishop of Mexico City, Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana, Cardinal Oswald Gracias, Archbishop of Mumbai and Archbishop Bruno Forte of Chieti, Italy.

In his intervention yesterday, Archbishop Comensoli said perhaps “a pebble of spiritual disruption” needs to be dropped into the “stagnant pools” where the Church’s enthusiasm for the Gospel and for mission have been allowed to wane, CNS reports.

“Our task is to rediscover a young Church that goes out, not to re-create a Church for the young to come to,” Archbishop Comensoli said.

The archbishop described the massive figure of Jesus in the Sistine Chapel fresco of the Last Judgment as “glowing with vitality and beautiful to behold. And he is gloriously young.”

“Our Redeemer is young because he is alive,” the archbishop said. In the same way, the church – his body – is meant to be young and alive, just as it was in the early days after Pentecost.

“Pentecost set off a Gospel fire in the disciples, anointing them and sending them out into the world,” he said. “The disciples did not wait for people to come to them; they got up and went out.”

Archbishop Comensoli urged the bishops to make an examination of conscience, asking themselves if they truly act like successors of the apostles, going out into the world with the Gospel like the Acts of the Apostles describes.

“Or have we stagnated in the Spirit, lost our missionary fire and become beholden to a ‘fake gospel’ of religious maintenance?” he asked.

“It is time to leave behind a Church that only sits around waiting,” he told his fellow bishops.